Marg Sysomos

It's highly customizable. You can do a boolean search for nearly any combination of things, which makes your search endlessly customizable. It's possible to find exactly what you're looking for.

There's a very limited data set. Search only pulls data from the last 13 months - basically just Twitter and a few public Facebook and Instagram stragglers. Searches that you've set up as "listen" presets collect data and add to a historical database. But the drawback here is that if you add a new partner or spokesperson, there's no way to go back and retroactively add that data.

Dashboards are hard to set up and aren't easy to change. Plus there are no real options to stylize or consolidate widgets into more digestible formats.

Social listening is an important piece of our business, especially in tracking competitors. But seeing that Facebook is still the largest player in the social space, looking at Sysomos data is really only giving you a small piece of the overall picture.

There are a lot of different ways you can organize the data but there are always missing gaps

There are always glitches, missing data or simply won't load. The customer service that they will fix something but really it takes weeks and you basically have to put a fire under their butt in order to get them to do anything.

The functions are not customizable so a lot of times the way that the functions are presented they are not in line with your business or what you need. Every time a social network's API changes the whole system is messed up for the next few days

Don't. I'm not familiar with all of the other players in the space, but this product was such a headache. Avoid at all costs

Social listening and pulling as much data about a particular topic to see when it was mentioned. To respond to people in one platform rather than bouncing to varies systems. But often times you had to go to the Social Network anyways because Sysmos wasn't working right

We mostly use Heartbeat for social listening. The numbers certainly make you feel good, but over half fall into "neutral", and require manual categorization. For a company with lots of mentions, this is impossible.

When it comes to social listening we do a better job jumping on for an hour each day than Heartbeat does tracking and properly categorizing our mentions. Want to add a filter that would flag certain words to make the mention negative? Sorry, not an option. Each company has different key words that define a post about them. A post such as, "Good, more pollution thanks to company xx," would be defined as positive because it contains the word good.

We presented some great numbers to upper management, only to realize they were seriously skewed and inaccurate.

It captures Twitter data relatively quickly and accurately, and the most useful aspects are the reach and Tweet life statistics.

You can't do much beyond reviewing Twitter statistics unfortunately. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube... all useless on Sysomos. It won't give you any insights beyond basic metrics and what it does pull is never close to the "big picture." The system is always down and the differences between reach on any given two days (never mind months are massive and hard to explain.

Sysomos is about 3 years behind new social monitoring software. It's the most basic social monitoring tool, but there are others out there for similar costs that can do way more for you and with the same amount of user ease.

We monitor ongoing campaigns, hashtag usage, and conversation sizes.

It's certainly comprehensive. If you only care about getting listening data, do not care about user interface or report design, and have money to burn, this is your tool.

I'd expect this design from a tool built in the 2000s, not 2015. Instead of changing the tool for the better, it seems like each successive iteration brings the platform a new set of clunky complications.

I would look elsewhere.

It gets the job done, but it doesn't do it well.